Boulder To Consider "Impeach Bush" Resolution

Yet another quaint American town takes up the important municipal business of impeachment, this time Boulder, CO.

Boulder's elected leaders are expected to make time in their busy schedules to decide whether to draft and vote on a resolution calling for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Immediately after the decision is made, city leaders are also expected to consider the important business of calling for another Nobel for Al Gore and negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

An end to world hunger and peace in our time is tentatively on the city council's agenda for the first week of March.

For the past few weeks, activists have been showing up at Boulder City Council meetings, carrying signs, handing out "impeach" pins and asking City Council members to take up such a resolution. Similar measures have passed in cities across the country, including Detroit and Telluride.

Liz Robinson, one of the organizers of the effort, said people hoping to see impeachment proceedings have given congressional Democrats — who won a majority in the fall of 2006 — plenty of time to act.

But since they haven't, she said, locally elected officials should take up the slack.

"Whether or not it's the city's business directly, like potholes, I feel this affects all of us," she said. "We're the ones who are paying the taxes to support this administration's depredations, especially the war."

Ms. Robinson then paused to make sure no one was reading her brain waves via the fillings in her teeth, then continued.

"Impeachment proceedings would be worth doing even if they only put the last few months of Bush's eight years in office at risk. We need to send a message that this all matters to us, whether it's last-minute or not," she said.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Boulder rolled their eyes at another government program not likely to show results, something for which municipal governments are rightly famous.

The group appears to have some support among the City Council, although it's not clear if it has the five votes it would take to get a resolution drafted and subsequently debated.

City Councilman Macon Cowles wrote in a memo to his colleagues that he'll likely make a motion at the Feb. 19 meeting asking that a resolution be drafted.

"I believe that these citizens deserve a hearing," Cowles wrote to the council.

It wouldn't be the first time the City Council has weighed in on matters far outside the city's physical boundaries. In 2006, the council approved a resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and in 2003, the council passed a resolution opposing the invasion.

Cheered by the success their previous grand-standing attention-seeking resolutions have enjoyed, Boulder's elected leaders will then gather for a photo-op and complimentary back-patting.

Deputy Mayor Crystal Gray, who helped draft the 2006 resolution, said Boulder has a tradition of debating big-picture issues.

"I'm a believer that the council should be responsive at the level of local government to issues that the residents raise, just like the Iraq war resolution," she said.

Not everyone on the Boulder City Council pretends to be in Congress.

City Councilman Ken Wilson said he's not on board. During a recent retreat, the City Council agreed to priorities ranging from fixing structural problems in the budget to doing better land-use planning.

"We did not identify national issues as a priority for work by council and staff. We are already seeing scheduling problems trying to address our priorities and the immediate needs of the city," he said. "Hours spent discussing national issues will reduce the amount of time we can spend on city issues."

In related news, the city of Gob's Nobbler, KY is expected to vote on a resolution calling for war crimes trials (with torture during testimony) for Boulder's City Council.

"War trials for Boulder's city council would be worth doing even if they only put the last few months of the council's last year in office at risk. We need to send a message that this all matters to us, whether it's last-minute or not," stated Dan Druff, Gob's Nobbler's mayor and Chief of Police.

"We want the newspapers to print articles about us too. We don't want left out."